Waking Jonah

Gary Bryson hosts a program about anabaptism on ABC Radio National called “The Anabaptist Vision“…

[Part 9 of a 12-part series]

Show: ABC Radio National
Full Podcast: The Anabaptist Vision
Date: 6/17/07
Host: Gary Bryson
Guests: Mark Hurst, Chris Marshall, and Jarrod McKenna

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Transcript:

Gary Bryson: Anabaptism is most prevalent today in North America, where the Mennonites in particular form strong church communities. But in Australia and New Zealand this kind of denominational Anabaptism is practically non-existent. What does exist in our region is a growing awareness of Anabaptist principles amongst Christians from many different traditions. As a pastoral worker for the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand, Mark Hurst is actively working towards this goal.

Mark Hurst: If we go back historically, the church denominations that came to Australia and New Zealand came out of Britain, and there were no Anabaptist churches in Britain at the time of settlement in Australia and New Zealand. So historically, there are no Anabaptist denominations in Australia-New Zealand. So it’s a fairly new idea. When my wife and I came to Australia in 1990, we were sent by a Mennonite mission board, and there were some people in Sydney that wanted to start a Mennonite church, but we started meeting people all across the country who said ‘We don’t necessarily need another denomination in Australia, but we are interested in this movement, this Anabaptist movement, and what it’s about. And ever since then, even in our literature, we talk about, ‘it’s not another denomination’. In some ways we are trying to influence the broader church in Australia and New Zealand in an Anabaptist way, bringing the Anabaptist perspective into the broader church scene.

Gary Bryson: Is it possible in essence to be Anglican and Anabaptist or even Catholic and Anabaptist?

Chris Marshall: I don’t only think it’s possible, I think it’s desirable, [though] I wouldn’t want to be heard at any point to be saying that only the Anabaptists have true Christianity, or that the mainstream traditions have somehow completely lost the plot and we have nothing to learn from them. It is, I think, as you said, a set of ideas, a set of commitments, a set of priorities, a set of instincts almost, that can work itself out in almost any tradition. I think it’s certainly possible for these Anabaptist convictions to express themselves in a Presbyterian and an Anglican and a Catholic and for that matter, Baptist world. What I find is that people come to these sort of commitments or conclusions quite independently of any knowledge of Anabaptism. They come to them just in virtue of their own growth and journey and reading and study and so on. And then they discover there’s been a tradition around for the last 500 years that has said this sort of thing. And one of the common – in fact I’ve used it on myself before I realised this was quite common – for people from a non-Anabaptist background, which is everybody in our part of the world really, who discover Anabaptism, they feel like they’ve come home. The metaphor of coming home, of feeling that what I have come to believe as the essence of Christian commitment, there’s actually been people saying this for a long time, there’s a label I can hang on my convictions.

Jarrod McKenna: This whole journey has got to do with my introduction to the Anabaptist tradition and how it kind of solidified a lot of things which used to be tensions for me.

Gary Bryson hosts a program about anabaptism on ABC Radio National called “The Anabaptist Vision“…

[Part 8 of a 12-part series]

Show: ABC Radio National
Full Podcast: The Anabaptist Vision
Date: 6/17/07
Host: Gary Bryson
Guests: Mark Hurst, Chris Marshall, and John Hirt

Download

Transcript:

Gary Bryson: The over-riding authority then for Anabaptists was and is the New Testament. All scripture is interpreted according to the teachings of Jesus Christ as they understand them. Perhaps the most important consequence of this is a fervent commitment to non-violence.

Peacemaking was and is in many ways one of the more radical expressions of Anabaptism, isn’t it, and it’s also one of the most controversial, and one of the other reasons that people were persecuted?

Mark Hurst: Yes. The Anabaptists in the 16th century and since have refused to join military forces, often refused to join police, and this goes back to an understanding of what the church is. For many Anabaptists, in the 16th century and even today, when they look at church history and they look at Constantine, rather than seeing that as a high moment in church history, they see that as the fall of the church, and they see the introduction of Christendom as something that they were against, that linking of church and state. So from the very beginning, they said no, the church should not be linked to the state, and because of that then, as Christians they didn’t get involved in the political forces, and particularly the police and the army, that they would use lethal force to enforce their ways.

Chris Marshall: When you come to the issue of violence, I think a huge cleavage opens up. As I understand the teaching of Jesus – and this is open to dispute, not everybody would agree – but as I understand the teaching of Jesus, he did reject coercive violence, he did encourage his followers to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, not to use the sword. And when you say well, if that’s the case and we look at Christian history, why has the church been so caught up in violence? To this day the dominant Christian position on war is the ‘just war’ theory, which believes that under certain circumstances, war is all but obligatory, and that it is not inconsistent with discipleship for Christians to participate in that. And so how does that square with the teaching of Jesus? Well, we either have some way of limiting the teaching of Jesus to personal conduct or to private areas so that it is no longer an obstacle to fighting a war, or we ignore it. So to take this seriously I think is quite radical.

Thorwald Lorenzen: It is very important that the church – actually all of religion, but in our setting, the church – has a clear peace witness, because we know that all over the world religion is functionalised to validate violence and war, what the state is still using as a political instrument. And here all religions are invited today, to make a clear commitment to non-violence.

Chris Marshall: The commitment to peace, the commitment to non-violence flows from an understanding of the teaching of Jesus. The Anabaptist tradition by and large said, well, this means that followers of Jesus must not be involved in lethal coercion, and I guess a corollary of that is if you’re not going to be involved in war, then it’s not enough just to withdraw into a kind of separate community of pacifism, but you also need to be committed to peace-making.

Thorwald Lorenzen: Today, as you know, for instance in the church’s stance with regard to the war in Iraq, there was basically a unanimous opinion of all the churches, and all the church leaders, to oppose the war. So we have reached the stage today where in light of modern military technology, most or perhaps all churches would agree that war is no longer an institution by which we need to do politics. So in a sense, the Anabaptist vision today has become ecumenical.

Gary Bryson hosts a program about anabaptism on ABC Radio National called “The Anabaptist Vision“…

[Part 7 of a 12-part series]

Show: ABC Radio National
Full Podcast: The Anabaptist Vision
Date: 6/17/07
Host: Gary Bryson
Guests: Chris Marshall and John Hirt

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Transcript:

Gary Bryson: At the core of all this is the idea of discipleship then, isn’t it, what you might call the hermeneutics of obedience, the belief that knowing the truth of scripture is contingent upon obedience to Jesus’ call to discipleship?

Chris Marshall: Well, what the Protestant Reformation rediscovered in particular was the role of faith. Luther’s personal conversion really, was a discovery of the fact that we are justified by faith, and that’s fine, there’s no problem with that. But the feature that I think the Anabaptists made more central was not faith or grace or the sacraments – I mean all of which they accepted – but what they saw as central was discipleship, was the image in the gospels of following Jesus, and not just following Jesus in terms of beliefs about Jesus, but actually following him in terms of an emulation of his lifestyle, his values, or his commitments. And so discipleship has always I think been more important in the Anabaptist tradition than theology really, than belief. Not that beliefs aren’t important, but the key issue is; is one committed to obey Jesus when he talks about these very hard things like violence. An understanding I think captured in a saying by one of the early Anabaptist leaders which was that no-one can claim to know Christ unless he follows him in life, that the knowledge of Christ really is dependent on a commitment to follow him. It’s only as one obeys the teaching of Jesus and as one is committed to obeying the teaching of Jesus does one truly understand the teaching of Jesus.

Now in our own day I think in the kind of world that we live in today, that understanding, that knowledge is not something that we acquire in a purely abstract, reflective, rationalistic way, but it is actually influenced by what we do. That’s something that we are far more comfortable with in the world. I think the Anabaptists saw it 500 years ago.

Gary Bryson: Another development of the time was what we today might call radical congregationalism, based on the authority of the gathered church, and the rejection of hierarchy. This was a distinctive feature of early Anabaptism, and remains so today.

Chris Marshall: The Catholic church was centred around the Majesterium which is the hierarchy of the church, its theologians, its bishops, its Pope and so on. The Protestant churches to some extent broke from that, but the role of the minister or the scholar leader was still pretty important. In the Anabaptist communities it really was the gathered community of believers who saw themselves as brothers and sisters and who didn’t accept a kind of clerical limitation on ministry. This is not unique to the Anabaptists, there have been many congregational movements that have sprung up since the Reformation. But this was a novelty at the time.

John Hirt: It’s problematic really. I mean you could just have the pooling of ignorance. It could be, ‘what I think is right at the time’. You end up with what people call the plain reading of the text, and at the worst, the Anabaptists’ interpretation via the gathered community could be a very literalist interpretation, and because they were a scattered as well as a gathered community – they literally were forced to live in Täuferhöhlen, ‘teufel’ in the German means devil, but they had to live in caves, and if you go in and around Zürich , you can actually go to these cave places where they were forced to live. They were pretty much peasant people who for the main were uneducated, and so, often, without wanting to aggrandise or adorn them too much, they could come up with pretty mad interpretations of the text, and they always needed, if you will, to come back to their scholars. And when their scholars were burned and drowned and murdered in the most dreadful ways, they really missed out a lot. But through it all, it has to be said that the wisdom of God and the commitment to discipleship shone through even where they weren’t in the presence of sound theologians. The gathered community was visited, if you will, with the wisdom of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Gary Bryson hosts a program about anabaptism on ABC Radio National called “The Anabaptist Vision“…

[Part 6 of a 12-part series]

Show: ABC Radio National
Full Podcast: The Anabaptist Vision
Date: 6/17/07
Host: Gary Bryson
Guests: Mark Hurst, John Hirt, and Chris Marshall

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Transcript:

Mark Hurst: For many of the churches in the reform tradition, orthodoxy would be the important thing. For those in the Anabaptist tradition, orthopraxy is important, right practice, rather than right belief. The Anabaptists would have agreed with the reformers on many doctrines and many beliefs, but for the reformers, the main question was how do we get saved? And the Anabaptists agreed with most of those answers, but then they went on to say What do we do now that we are saved? What are we saved for? So that was part of what made them different than some of the other Reformation churches and Christians at that time, stressing that yes, now that we’re saved, we’re saved for a life of good works, and that means getting involved with the poor, that means getting involved with those who are marginalised, and that means living in a world without power, and joining in with those marginalised giving up that power.

Gary Bryson: Mark Hurst. For Anabaptists, following Christ has practical consequences. John Hirt.

John Hirt: One of the most misused books in the world is the Bible. You can make the Bible justify just about anything, but if you take the proclamatory, the charismatic heart of scripture, if you come to the interpretive key of the New Testament, you’re unable to do that. Let me illustrate. Without a doubt, the interpretive key, the hermeneutical key of the New Testament out of the Apostolic Confession is how does what you intend to do or what you say you are doing, how does it match the mind and the heart of the crucified and risen one? So how could you be a homophobe, if you are matching your life and your view of others to the mind and the heart of the crucified one? How can you declare war on people? How can you not care for the environment and for the whole world in which we live? How could you be a racist? How could you be differentiated against the poor, how could you not be in sympathy and in solidarity with our Aboriginal people because of their just cause? If your interpretive key is the same as Jesus, if you follow the way in the path of the crucified one, then life is viewed totally differently and to the Anabaptists, we owe that as a great debt.

Chris Marshall: All Christian traditions are Christocentric in the sense that all Christian traditions focus on the person of Jesus Christ as being essential to what Christianity is on about. It’s Jesus that makes Christianity not Judaism if you like. That Christocentrism has often worked itself out at a kind of doctrinal level or a more abstract level that Christ is central because he achieved salvation through his death and resurrection. Or Christ is central because he’s the sort of lynchpin in God’s overall covenantal dealing with the human race. It’s been often expressed at a more abstract level. For the Anabaptists, it was expressed at a strongly ethical level which is to say that Christ is central because he shows us how we are to live, and we must seek to imitate his way of living. In fact in many Christian traditions, there’s been a real ambivalence about this idea of the imitation of Christ because people fear that it brings Christ down to the level of being merely an example, a very good human being. But in the Anabaptist tradition it’s very central, that Christ demonstrates by his own life and articulates in his own teaching, the way we too, if we follow him, should live.

Gary Bryson hosts a program about anabaptism on ABC Radio National called The Anabaptist Vision…

[Part 1 of a 12-part series]

Show: ABC Radio National
Full Podcast: The Anabaptist Vision
Date: 6/17/07
Host: Gary Bryson
Guests: John Hirt and Thorwald Lorenzen

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Transcript:

Gary Bryson: Menno Simons was one of the leaders of the early Anabaptist movement. He was a Dutch cleric who gives his name to the best known of the Anabaptist groups today, the Mennonites.

Early Anabaptists were persecuted not only by the Catholic church, but by Protestant reformers, who regarded Anabaptist beliefs as crossing the line to heresy. So what were these beliefs, why were they considered so dangerous, and why are they still important today?

The core of the Anabaptist vision is found in the key ideas of the separation of church and state, adult baptism, radical discipleship, the authority of the gathered community, and a fervent belief in non-violence. As we’ll see in this program, these are ideas which are today informing a new generation of Christians committed to political and social change. Anabaptism is not a sectarian creed, but is instead a theological vision which can inform the practice and faith of Christians from many different traditions. More controversially, it is also a vision which seeks to redefine the role of the church in our everyday lives.

John Hirt: Historians of the Reformation referred to the Anabaptists as the radical reformers, or the left-wing of the Reformation.

Gary Bryson: The Reverend Dr John Hirt is the Uniting Church Chaplain for the University of Sydney and the University of Technology, and we’ll also hear from the Reverend Doctor Thorwald Lorenzen, Professor of Theology and principal researcher, the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University.

John Hirt: They got their beginnings in 1525 in a little village called Zollikon, which is not too far from Zürich in Switzerland. And their big concern was that the reformers were not reformatory enough. When the reformers talked about reformation, the Anabaptists talked about restitution. They wanted the church to be restored right back to the New Testament faith.

Thorwald Lorenzen: When we speak about Anabaptists today, we generally are speaking about the peaceful Anabaptists who were in Switzerland, in Southern Germany, and in Middle Germany and Holland. We’re not speaking about the more violent eschatological Anabaptists who were in Münster, people like Thomas Müntzer. So we have to distinguish between various Anabaptist movements. The Anabaptists which I’m talking about in Switzerland and Germany, they would agree with the major reformers like Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland and Martin Luther in Germany, in their response to the Catholic church. They would agree with the reformers, but they felt that the reformers’ commitment to the authority of the Scriptures was not radical enough.

Gary Bryson: The radical restitution demanded by the pacifist Anabaptists was a call to return to the values and precepts of the early Christian church as they saw them: pacifism, discipleship, free acceptance of the faith through adult baptism, and a separation of church and state.

Byron LeBeau from Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio discusses fallen angels, giants, evil spirits, and the book of Enoch…

[Part 5 of a 5-part series]

Show: Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio
Full Podcast: Going Inside The Curs-ed Net
Date: 5/27/08
Host: Byron LeBeau

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Byron LeBeau

Notes: If the dynamic is true what Enoch is saying, that means that these same evil spirits that are bound on earth… the spirits of the giants after they die… they can’t leave the earth, so they roam in desert places and all around the world looking for something to inhabit; So when we get to the New Testament, what do we find? We find Jesus casting out evil spirits–wicked spirits; There’s a causal connection between the fallen down ones that have been cursed with being earth-bound and the ones that Jesus cast out, who always seemed to need a body to go into… and that’s why Jesus allowed them to go into the pigs… this is absolute Scripture; So we can connect the dots of absolute Scripture with Enochian scripture, and then maybe if we extend that… what about today, where we may be seeing the same demonic forces operating in shells… and you could fill in the blank of what those shells are… but they could be greys, and reptilians, and hybrids, and all of these other things

Byron LeBeau from Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio discusses fallen angels, giants, evil spirits, and the book of Enoch…

[Part 4 of a 5-part series]

Show: Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio
Full Podcast: Going Inside The Curs-ed Net
Date: 5/27/08
Host: Byron LeBeau

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Byron LeBeau

Notes: At least 9 of the evangelists–especially in the New Testament–have either quoted directly or indirectly what comes out of the Ethiopian book of Enoch; “Biblical Parallels to the Book of Enoch” – [Go to http://www.byronlebeau.com/ and click on the article in the Navigator]; John, Peter, Paul, etc. are very familiar with one of the latter copies of the book of Enoch… and that’s one of the reasons that Jude was able to quote Chapter 2 of the book of Enoch, expressing Enoch as a prophet; J.T. Milik found it was in fact the oldest book–even older than Job–and it did have a very good presence in the Hebrew literature… then one has to say, there must be something to this book that lends itself to some form of authenticity; Go to the 15th chapter of 1 Enoch–which is the Ethiopian book of Enoch–and read what it says about the giants, that they in fact were born of spirit and flesh… right there is a code–the spirit means they came from the fallen angels and the flesh means they came from the daughters of men, which is exactly what it says cryptically in Genesis 6:4; But it goes on to enlighten us what all of this means… 1 Enoch 15

Byron LeBeau and Greg Messina from Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio discuss the book of Enoch…

[Part 3 of a 5-part series]

Show: Curs-ed Net Breakthrough Radio
Full Podcast: Going Inside The Curs-ed Net
Date: 5/27/08
Hosts: Byron LeBeau and Greg Messina

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Byron LeBeau

Notes: A majority of the book ["The Curs-ed Net"] goes into the book of Enoch, which is non-canonical; Most Christians shy away from any non-canonical texts; Enoch was mentioned in at least four books of the Bible; Many of the early church fathers (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cassian, etc.) all supported what Enoch had said… but there were these forces in the world that didn’t like this approach because it was almost unmasking the real nature of the fallen angels; A kibosh was put on the book of Enoch; When Jude cited Enoch, he cited what is in fact Chapter 22 of the Ethiopian book of Enoch, which was not found until the 18th century and was not really fully translated by Richard Laurence until the 19th century; Enoch was a prophet of God and was one of the only other people in Scripture–other than Elijah–who was taken up… who did not see death

Bruxy Cavey, pastor of The Meeting House church in Ontario, Canada, discusses the early church’s views on pacifism, before and after Constantine…

[Part 3 of a 3-part series]

Ministry: The Meeting House
Full Podcast: The Emperor’s New Clothes
Date: 4/11/10
Speaker: Bruxy Cavey

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Bruxy Cavey

Notes: Constantine wanted Christianity to flourish… but it would flourish at the demise of the Roman Empire… he had a problem that needed a solution, and some of the best minds went to work, such as Augustine; Augustine, then, started writing things like this: “War is waged to serve the peace”; Here we have within Christian circles the first time that peace as a means and peace as an ends is separated; Additional quotes from Augustine; In his writing he turns more and more to the Old Testament, and then you see another trend happening that happens within just war theory… and that is a desperate attempt to find some clue in the teaching of Jesus that might tell us He didn’t actually mean what He said and say what He meant in His very clear teaching on the way of peace; And so we see this snippet, or that parable, or this over here, and that starts to come up… that pattern still exists today… comes up often when talking with non-pacifists, and we see it begin in the writing of Augustine; Luke 14:23; It is an exercise in exegetical desperation… but we see it become the norm in Augustinian thinking and rationale

Bruxy Cavey, pastor of The Meeting House church in Ontario, Canada, discusses the early church’s views on pacifism, before and after Constantine…

[Part 2 of a 3-part series]

Ministry: The Meeting House
Full Podcast: The Emperor’s New Clothes
Date: 4/11/10
Speaker: Bruxy Cavey

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Bruxy Cavey

Notes: One of the last voices before the Constantinian shift that we hear from is Lactantius, who is actually the tutor of Constantine’s son, Crispus; Quote from Lactantius; In this commandment of God, no exceptions at all ought to be made to the rule that it always wrong to kill a man, whom God has wished to be regarded as a sacrosanct creature; From Constantine on, things change, and over the centuries ahead we get a new norm; Examples of what becomes normative after Constantine; Quote from Jacques de Vitry; Now pacifism is seen as demonic; Quote from John of Mantua; What we find in much of their writings is the shift has moved from the example and teaching of Jesus to the example of other Old Testament saints, where violence is used to establish the kingdom of Israel and maintain the kingdom of Israel… and so David, Joshua, and others become the heroes of the faith, and Jesus steps to the sideline in much of their writing; Quote from Pope Innocent IV

Bruxy Cavey, pastor of The Meeting House church in Ontario, Canada, discusses the early church’s views on pacifism, before and after Constantine…

[Part 1 of a 3-part series]

Ministry: The Meeting House
Full Podcast: The Emperor’s New Clothes
Date: 4/11/10
Speaker: Bruxy Cavey

Download

Bruxy Cavey

Notes: Pre-Constantine, the church that was associated with the Roman Empire rallied around a concept called “patientia“… it is Latin for “patience”… it meant “enduring evil so as not to commit it, rather than committing evil so as not to endure it”; They unanimously taught that we should do anything to avoid killing, because that would destroy our witness for Christ; It’s always ok to die for a cause… it’s just never ok to kill for a cause; Suffering well… dying well… loving your enemies as they extinguish your life… could be one of the greatest witnesses for the transformative nature of the kingdom of Christ at work in your heart… so why would we fight back to preserve our life?; The word “martyr”, which has now come to mean someone who dies for their faith, doesn’t actually mean that–it means a “witness”–someone who is a witness is a martyr; The early church said, well, one of the best ways you can be a witness is actually to die for your faith while you love your enemy; So to be one who dies for the faith came to be seen as the ultimate “witness”, and they were called “martyrs”; The unanimous voice of the church pre-Constantine… quotes from Origen, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Arnobius; You can agree or disagree, but this was the unanimous opinion of the church for 300 years

Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN compares the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of God…

[Part 5 of an ongoing series...]

Ministry: Woodland Hills Church
Full Podcast: Taking America Back for God?
Date: 4/18/04
Speaker: Greg Boyd
Notes: The Constantinian revolution… when the church adopted the slogan that we still have with us today: “The church militant and triumphant”; For the first four centuries, the church grew by people imitating Jesus–literally; They were persecuted, they were put to death; The word “martyr” means “witness”, but it became synonymous with one who dies for their faith, because that’s the main way that they witnessed; In the 4th Century, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity; Now Christians for the first time began to taste the possibility of having the power of the sword; Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD… in 381 Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the first “infidel” was put to death in 382; What follows are centuries of some of the most barbaric bloodshed the world has ever seen… heretics were routinely put to death, unbelievers routinely put to death, the Inquisition, the Crusades, Muslims; Whole towns were slaughtered because they disagreed with the official teaching of the Holy Catholic Church of Constantine; But it continued on with the Protestant Reformation–there was no improvement there whatsoever; We’ve got to see the demonic irony in all of this… in the name of the One who taught us to turn the other cheek, the church cut off people’s heads; In the name of the One who taught us to love our enemies–to lay down our life for our enemies–the church burned enemies alive; In the name of the One who forbid taking up the sword, the church swung the sword, and swung it hard–we’ve got to see the insanity of this

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Greg Boyd

Chris White from Nowhere to Run explains the Prewrath rapture perspective…

[Part 13 of a 27-Part series]

[*To get the most out of this teaching, please see the full video presentation by clicking on the link below.]

Show: Nowhere to Run
Full Video: The Prewrath Rapture – The Rapture Puzzle Solved with Matthew 24
Date: 4/2/11
Host: Chris White
Notes: Matthew 24:9; Revelation 6:7-8; The 4th seal – death; “by the wild beasts of the earth”; The word for “by” is a different Greek word than the other “with’s” in the verse; Indicates more definitely the actual agent of destruction; The meaning is defined as “under”, often meaning “under authority” of something working directly as a subordinate; It seems that the other things in this verse–the killing with sword and famine–are “by”, or “under authority”, of the “wild beasts”; The term “wild beasts” has led to some false interpretations; “Wild beast” is not the correct translation of the Greek in Revelation 6:8; The word is “therion” and it basically means “beast”, and it can be translated as “beast” (Titus 1:12), or “wild beast” (Acts 11:6)–context determines which translation is best; It’s used 39 times in the book of Revelation, and 38 times the term refers to either the beast (as in the Antichrist), or the false prophet (the second beast), or the image of the beast, and it correctly is translated there as “beast”; However the translators, attempting to clarify the meaning in Revelation 6:8 incorrectly translated the text as “wild beast”–the only time it is not translated simply as “beast” in Revelation; There is no grounds for the translation “wild beasts” in Revelation 6:8; Both famine and plague are here attributed to the methods in which these “beasts” kill, that is in addition to the sword

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Chris White from Nowhere to Run explains the Prewrath rapture perspective…

[Part 12 of a 27-Part series]

[*To get the most out of this teaching, please see the full video presentation by clicking on the link below.]

Show: Nowhere to Run
Full Video: The Prewrath Rapture – The Rapture Puzzle Solved with Matthew 24
Date: 4/2/11
Host: Chris White
Notes: The step-by-step chronology in Matthew 24 of the signs leading up to the rapture and the wrath of God are the exact same signs we see in Revelation chapters 6-8, which are speaking of the 7 seals that need to be opened before the scroll (the wrath of God) can be read; Matthew 24:5; Revelation 6:1-2; The 1st seal corresponds to the first events in Matthew 24 – false christ’s; Matthew 24:6; The 2nd seal in Revelation 6:3-4 – wars; Matthew 24:7; The 3rd seal in Revelation 6:5-6 – famines

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